“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
I start this review with a lofty quote by Albert Einstein, not to attain some level of self-importance in my writing but because it seems fitting for Tomorrowland – the latest live action adventure from Disney and director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) – because of how it innocently, perhaps childishly, celebrates imagination in storytelling without real concern for making it make a whole lot of sense in the process. It’s ultimately admirable in its intent but frustratingly short of the brilliance that it could, and should, have attained.
Tomorrowland opens with George Clooney talking directly to the camera, letting us know that the future can be scary and trying to relay to us exactly why. He keeps being interrupted by a girl from behind the camera who asks him to focus on the nice stuff too as, hey, it ain’t all bad! Or at least was for a time. It turns out the girl is a spirited and optimistic teenager named Casey (played by Britt Robertson), daughter of a soon-to-be-laid-off NASA engineer (played by country singer Tim McGraw, for some reason) hell-bent on stopping her father’s launch station workplace from being dismantled.
This catches the eye of the police, of course, and she is thrown in jail. As she is being bailed out, she finds a mysterious pin with a blue “T” on it and when she picks it up finds herself instantly transported to the mysterious and wonderful world of the title. After doing a bit of investigating on her own she eventually tracks down Frank Walker (George Clooney), a former boy genius inventor with knowledge of Tomorrowland who helps her try to get there and understand why it’s so important.
Along with Bird, the film is co-written by Damon Lindelof and that may boil down to why many people may take against it. For many he’s the guy who strung them along for six years on Lost before disappointing with an answer-light finale (one that I personally adore with all my heart) and has since been labelled the “kiss of death” geek screenwriter because of his work on Prometheus and others. He’s a screenwriter who has always been more interested in the questions than the answers, the idea in the abstract, the wider context of what it means rather than how it logically works. It worked brilliantly on Lost, a show that was ultimately more spiritual and philosophical than anything else, but can sometimes jar with certain stories, particularly one being told in a finite amount of time on the big-screen.
Such is the case with Tomorrowland, which is a film that’s more fun the less you know about what’s behind the curtain. The strongest stuff can be found in the earlier segments, when it functions as a chase movie more than anything else – this is where Bird’s more driven, briskly paced writing and directorial sensibilities come most into play – sort of like the last part of Michael Bay’s The Island but actually fun and exciting. It makes clever use early on of teasing us with the titular world, utilizing the novel technique of it appearing in brief only when Casey touches the pin. We even get to see a larger view of the place – which appears like a sort of futuristic version of the namesake Disneyland theme park that exists in real life – in a surprisingly forthright flashback for Clooney’s crucial character, a role into which the A-lister fits surprisingly well. This first segment also introduces us to Athena (brilliantly played by relative newcomer Raffey Cassidy), a perpetual child android on a mission to help Casey, one of the film’s neatest concepts in that she’s basically an adolescent Terminator.
It’s just a shame, then, that Tomorrowland unravels quite easily the more you pull at the various threads that are dangling off the end of it, with barely anything there by the time it gets to the point of almost literally reading a bullet point presentation of all its answers and secrets, lecturing us about why exactly the eponymous world matters to ours. There are smatterings of the preachy world messages and clunky sci-fi exposition as it goes along but it takes it to a whole new level once it lets the cat out of the bag.
The explanations never feel organic or pleasingly revelatory, just lazily hashed out in a style that’s about as subtle as a robot punch to the face and entirely at odds with the imaginative visuals that surround it. Its messages are well-meaning and certainly relevant to today’s society but it’s a case of wonky storytelling and a heavy-handed approach to those messages holding back a visually eye-popping adventure, one whose final hand makes you reflect badly even on the good stuff that’s come before.
Tomorrowland is by no means a bad film, there’s still some neat set-pieces, ideas, CGI visuals and general childlike sense of “what if?” wonderment, infused with the love for classic adventure and sci-fi films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters of the Third Kind by its makers and all moulded together using a distinctly Disney aesthetic. It’s also one that demands to be seen on the big-screen in a more serene, “soak it all in” way that even the mighty Marvel cannot claim. But even if there’s a lot to recommend for those with inherent love for adventurous, Spielbergian escapades, it’s also one of those films that reaches out for greatness and doesn’t have enough there to successfully grasp. The fact that it could have makes it all the more frustrating.
